


Let Me Near You

by Her_Madjesty



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Lack of Communication, Mutual Pining, Recovery, poor communication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 13:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10968288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: September, and the chair that Wolfgang’s dragged up beside Felix’s hospital bed is doing its best to leave an impression on his ass.Or:Felix recovers. Wolfgang watches. Kala lingers.





	Let Me Near You

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I've recently binged watched all of Season 02, and I wanted to see what I could contribute to the fandom. Some technical notes: one asterisk (*) means there's been a time jump between paragraphs. Three asterisks (***) means there's been a POV change. 
> 
> I hope you like this short! XOXO

September, and the chair that Wolfgang’s dragged up beside Felix’s hospital bed is doing its best to leave an impression on his ass. He shifts and winces, eyes shooting towards the nearest door before dropping down to his cuticles again.

In all likelihood, he’s spent more time here staring at his hands than he has at Felix. He can’t be sure, though; he’d have to ask someone for the statistics.

(It’s a bad joke, and he knows it, but it reminds him of _her_ , all the same.)

It’s hard to breathe in this cramped little room; every time he inhales he gets a noseful of floor cleaner, bleach-y and burning. He can’t tell if the nurses have replaced the air freshener in the hall yet, doesn’t think he’d be able to smell it if they had – doesn’t think he can smell much of anything anymore.

September, and Wolfgang closes his eyes, lets the smell of bleach float away. It’s replaced with the scent of coffee grounds – better than the stuff the occasional nurse will force on him, but not by much.

Wolfgang sighs.

Somewhere where the air is dry and the world is a touch warmer, Nomi is up late, pouring herself a cup while Amanita sleeps on the too-small bed that they share. Wolfgang glances around their shelter, notes the locks newly installed on the door, and feels some of the worry in his chest loosen.

“You’re lurking,” Nomi tells him. There’s warmth in the distracted tones of her voice, one that makes him chuckle as he walks the floor behind her. His boots make the floorboard of the small room creak. Nomi glances away from her computer to glare at him, but she’s only half-admonishing.

“No one else can hear me,” Wolfgang tells her.

“No one but me,” Nomi agrees. “And the rest of us, I suppose.”

September, and Capheus lifts his head from his mother’s couch to chuckle. Wolfgang looks over to him and feels a familiar pleasant spark in his chest. Capheus, who is always smiling, who Wolfgang’s been with when he’s scared, shrugs at him. Nomi, settled at Shiro’s kitchen table, only shakes her head.

A television shines in their peripheral vision, muted but glowing. Wolfgang looks over and watches as Van Damme drop kicks his way to safety, past men bearing guns and up towards a villain with a thick, terrible mustache.

“Conan’s not the same,” Capheus tells him. His voice is thick, muddled with sleep.

“They’re more alike than you think,” Wolfgang disagrees. “You just need to give him a chance.”

Felix, in front of him, lets out a sigh in his sleep. The muscles in Wolfgang’s back go tight; he shifts in his seat and ignores the way his body continues to ache.

He keeps Felix’s collection of movies underneath the bed, now; when the nurses are feeling generous, they’ll encourage him to go up on his toes and put one in to the chained-up DVD player beneath the room’s tiny television. If _Wolfgang_ is feeling as generous, he’ll do just that. He’ll move closer to Felix, enough to nudge the other man’s hand with his own, and he’ll run lines, pretend that his hair is longer, his body thicker, his life simpler. There’ll be no embarrassment on his face when the nurses catch him. If he flushes at all, it’ll be because he’s seen the sadness in their eyes, the pity in their lukewarm smiles.

Felix’s eyes twitch beneath his eyelids whether Wolfgang watches Conan or not. Still, he doesn’t wake.

*

October, and Wolfgang leans against the uneven brick of a convenient store that doesn’t have a name, smoking his way through a pack of Chesterfields. The air hasn’t quite gone biting, but it’s getting there – he can taste it in between puffs: the chill on the back of his tongue pushes past the nicotine burning through his system.

The nurses had come early in the morning, when the world was still blurry, and taken Felix from his hospital bed. They’d placated Wolfgang with reassuring words, but noon has come and gone, and Wolfgang hasn’t seen any sign of them since.

His fingers aren’t quite shaking as he pulls the cigarette from his mouth, but sweat is beginning to bead on the back of his neck. It freezes against his too-pale skin and bites, unrelenting.

Sun settles in beside him, still dressed in her too-light blues. She plucks the cigarette from between his fingers and takes a drag for herself. Wolfgang goes to complain, but he finds his voice sticks to his throat.

It’s strange, watching the tightness around Sun’s eyes go loose. She looks relaxed here, a contrast to his dark lines and the tension in his shoulders.

She, at least, doesn’t require words from him. Instead, Wolfgang looks away and readjusts his position, lining the rough of the brick up so it better fits the lines of his back. Together they watch the sun dance above barren trees, watch Wolfgang’s breath turn to smog in the afternoon air.

Sun lingers for half an hour, burning his cigarette down until there’s little to nothing left. When she passes it back to him, the tip gleams with just a touch of wetness.

Wolfgang rouses himself, forces an eyeroll as he drops the stick and crushes it beneath his boot. Sun smirks at him and shakes her head.

“You are near several trained health professionals, are you not?” she asks. “You should have little to fear of cooties. Or people you cannot handle.”

Wolfgang’s sharp laugh cuts through the chilling air, but Sun is gone before she can hear it.

A presence rises in the back of his brain, warm and far too familiar. For a moment, the scent of smoke is overpowered by incense, drawn in by his burst of amusement.

Wolfgang’s mood drops at once. He pushes off the wall and ignores the taste rising in the back of his throat, something dark and spiced and wanting. He makes his way indoors, pulling his jacket more tightly around his shoulders. He walks away from the glow of Mumbai and buries himself in Germany’s cold.

Kala murmurs something in the back of his mind, but it is overpowered by the thundering of Wolfgang’s own heart.

By the time he’s settled in Felix’s room, the sweat on the back of his neck has thawed. Wolfgang focuses on his hands instead of the empty bed and finds them shaking.

*

Early November, and the window leading in to Felix’s room is lined with snow. Wolfgang traces patterns against the glass and listens with half an ear as Riley, stuck in some hole in some city he doesn’t know, tells him stories of blizzards that kept her home from school and stuck beneath her father’s piano. If he tries hard enough, Wolfgang can feel Will’s presence hovering just behind hers, dizzy and out of sorts. It’s enough to distract Riley from him, and he lets their connection fade. They leave warmth behind in their place, the both of them, but it’s not enough to drive the goosebumps from his skin.

(Kala has not tried to visit him again, not even in his sleep. He can feel her, just out of reach; she listens when he speaks to Felix, walks beside him when he retreats, but she never appears to him. Some small, bitter part of him wonders just how she’s managed it.)

“Her lies are not like mine,” Lito tells him. “Her lies come from a more...moral place.”

Wolfgang tries not to roll his eyes. If Mumbai warms him to the core, then Mexico City should, as well. Yet he still finds himself bringing up his hands, trying his best to rub the cold away.

Lito sits on the opposite side of Felix’s bed, staring at Wolfgang’s brother with distinct curiosity. He looks to Wolfgang, asking permission before reaching out a hand to brush a lock of hair away from Felix’s eyes.

Wolfgang watches him and crosses his arms over his chest. It is not a possessive thing (one cannot be jealous of someone who is part of one’s self,) but Lito’s ease of feeling, even in his own mourning, makes Wolfgang’s mouth hot with envy.

Lito looks up and smirks at him, only for a moment. “You do not want to be like me, my friend,” he says, leaning back from Felix’s bed.

“And how do you know?” Wolfgang asks.

Something in Lito’s face goes a little bit softer. He looks to Felix again, then up and past Wolfgang’s head.

Kala hovers, just out of sight, her arms wrapped around herself as she, too, braces herself against the cold. Wolfgang cannot see her, cannot sense her any more than usual, but he knows by Lito’s expression that someone else is there.

He turns around, but the window reveals nothing but his melting patterns and the gentle fall of snow.

“Your life is complicated,” Lito tells him as he turns back again. “So is mine. They are different types of complicated, sure, but I can lie through my complications.” He looks towards the window again. “I can keep myself from the things I want and tell myself that I do not want them. Somedays I can actually believe myself, as well.”

“And what makes you think I can’t?”

Lito’s expression is unbearably fond, too much like the nurses’. Wolfgang shies away.

“You try, my friend,” Lito tells him, “but you were never meant to be an actor.”

Wolfgang opens his mouth to answer, but then the door to Felix’s room swings open and he’s on his feet, prepared for armed men or his relatives or nurses with too-tragic faces. In the breaths of his rise, Lito disappears.

***

Kala remains.

Wolfgang doesn’t know it, but she stands behind him while the nurses talk, their perfume reeking in her nose. He can’t see her, but she sits down beside him when they leave, reaches out and strokes Felix’s fingers while he sleeps.

Wolfgang looks at her once, his eyes not quite seeing her. Kala’s heart aches for the dishonesty of it.

“I know you’re there,” she hears him say, but he’s looking just too far too the right, past her and out towards the field of snow.

“No,” Kala replies, her voice tired and soft. “No, you don’t.”

By the time Wolfgang has lifted his hand to try and grab hers, catching the last whiff of marigold and _her_ , she’s slipped away. She leaves his hand hanging, outstretched, ready to touch her curls, but instead it presses against the window, against the cold, against the white of the German winter.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought! 
> 
> I spent a lot of time trying to explain just how "visiting" worked to my friend who'd never seen the show before, and there was a lot of complication with who could see who and why and when. In this short, I try to explore another version of separation between Kala and Wolfgang - that of Kala visiting the people who are visiting Wolfgang, or managing surface level visits. I hope all of that came through!


End file.
